friolator
Explorer
- Joined
- Jun 9, 2016
- Messages
- 80
We want to build a FreeNAS system to act as a rolling backup for our high performance RAID-Based SAN. Basically, we want a clone of our SAN for disaster recovery purposes and nothing more. Currently we've got about 256TB of space on the SAN, but may expand it in the future. On the FreeNAS side, performance isn't a huge concern, since it's really just about having a backup.
I happen to have several brand new Xeon 5500 CPUs in the closet, so I'm thinking of a system that looks something like this:
SuperMicro X8DTH-iF
192GB DDR3-1333 ECC Registered DIMM
Dual Xeon 5500 (each 4 core)
Intel or Chelsio 10Gbe NIC
I'd pick up a used 36-drive server chassis to house this
We have several LSI cards kicking around from when we last played with FreeNAS a few years ago, and that motherboard supports quite a few PCIe cards, so we'd probably add some more. And we have many, many drives of various sizes and speeds in the closet, ranging from 2TB to 8TB, both 3gbps and 6gbps. We'd likely have a mix of them. As we expand the SAN's RAID with larger drives roughly every year, the decommissioned drives would move into the FreeNAS box, so our available backup space would increase.
My plan is to make an SMB share on the FreeNAS box to correspond with each shared volume on the SAN. One of our Windows servers would run incremental backups to move the data from the SAN to the appropriate bucket on the FreeNAS box each night.
This is not intended to be a long-term backups solution, but more of a mirror of the SAN, in case of a failure of the main system.
My questions are:
1) Does the above system sound like it'd work well? I know it's not the most up to date, but we just want stability here and we're on a budget. Speed is secondary in this case.
2) Can we use fewer controller cards and a chassis with port expanders?
Thanks!
I happen to have several brand new Xeon 5500 CPUs in the closet, so I'm thinking of a system that looks something like this:
SuperMicro X8DTH-iF
192GB DDR3-1333 ECC Registered DIMM
Dual Xeon 5500 (each 4 core)
Intel or Chelsio 10Gbe NIC
I'd pick up a used 36-drive server chassis to house this
We have several LSI cards kicking around from when we last played with FreeNAS a few years ago, and that motherboard supports quite a few PCIe cards, so we'd probably add some more. And we have many, many drives of various sizes and speeds in the closet, ranging from 2TB to 8TB, both 3gbps and 6gbps. We'd likely have a mix of them. As we expand the SAN's RAID with larger drives roughly every year, the decommissioned drives would move into the FreeNAS box, so our available backup space would increase.
My plan is to make an SMB share on the FreeNAS box to correspond with each shared volume on the SAN. One of our Windows servers would run incremental backups to move the data from the SAN to the appropriate bucket on the FreeNAS box each night.
This is not intended to be a long-term backups solution, but more of a mirror of the SAN, in case of a failure of the main system.
My questions are:
1) Does the above system sound like it'd work well? I know it's not the most up to date, but we just want stability here and we're on a budget. Speed is secondary in this case.
2) Can we use fewer controller cards and a chassis with port expanders?
Thanks!